Mr. Nick Ashmore:

The choice of the vehicle to manage the fund is really a policy matter. Certainly the indication we have is the fund will be operated within the NTMA structure. Given that we are already managing sovereign wealth and other funds there is a strong logic to that. In regard to housing, ISIF is active in the housing space. We committed more than €1 billion so far. We are exploring the limits of what we can do in that space in regard to deploying funds. We are conscious that a gap is emerging in the equities space. We are strongly looking at that. We have invested up and down the capital structure. At the beginning we invested strongly in senior debt. There was a sense that the banks would only go so far in their volume of senior debt for developers that they would deploy. Therefore we deployed the Activate Fund and cornerstoned that investment. That investment has been very productive in terms of the amount of housing it has funded. We worked with fund managers in the mezzanine space and more recently we have done some equity investments in that space. There are many factors in terms of the challenge in the housing market. Finance is certainly an important factor. It is not one of the only constraining factors. The presence of another investor is not necessarily going to change the dynamic beyond the fact that we are deploying as much as we can and trying to leverage in other players into the market to deploy in the commercial space. If another fund is active in that space it will not be on a soft money basis. The new fund is likely to have a commercial approach to investing. Its objective will be to maximise return. Should Irish housing be an attractive asset in the context of a global opportunity certainly there would be a logic to going into that. However, I am not sure that will be the case for some time. We are not constrained in terms of the capital we have available to put into this space. The biggest constraint is finding the partners to work with, the opportunities to deploy the funding and viable situations where it stacks up commercially to invest the money and build those houses.

We are very much on the commercial side of the line. There are many different State institutions on the supporting side of the line. Home Building Finance Ireland sits somewhere in the middle. There is the Housing Finance Agency, the Land Development Agency and if we can do anything to support them, we will. Some of the developments in which we invest have Part 5 social housing. About 1,500 social houses have been built through financing from ISIF over the last while. We are doing as much as we can and will continue to do so. If we can do more, we will do more. I am not sure another fund in this space with sovereign wealth is necessarily a net benefit. It could be but I would not say it is necessarily a net benefit in addressing that challenge.